Pharma customer experience trends and CX measurement best practice

Alongside my DT Consulting colleague Eleni Lee I’ll be appearing at the BHBIA’s 2023 Winter Seminar on Friday to present some of our customer experience data and discuss CX measurement best practices.

More details about the event, which is only open to BHBIA members, are available here. The full programme also includes Novartis’ customer experience activation director Ben Head and content strategy lead Krissie Mee exploring why CX is so important in 2023 and beyond.

Pharma customer experience (CX) – the global picture

At DT Consulting we’ve just published our first global customer experience benchmark, based on a survey of 6,270 HCPs across 14 markets and 8 specialty areas, building on the reports we’ve compiled since 2017.

For this latest research we once again deployed our Customer Experience Quotient® (CXQ®) methodology to measure how well doctors perceive the interactions they have with particular pharmaceutical companies.

Ranking 32 pharma companies, we found UCB, Gilead, and Novo Nordisk to be pharma’s leaders in CX. The report also shows how companies are ranked in terms of their use of digital and non-digital channels, as well as how HCPs rated pharma companies for the personalisation they provide.

The ascent of pharma marketing

Pharmaceutical companies with a chief marketing officer are thin on the ground, but their number will shortly see a slight increase thanks to a new appointment at Pfizer.

The pharmaceutical company has recruited Andreas “Drew” Panayiotou from Verily, the life sciences business of Google’s parent company Alphabet, to the new role of biopharma global chief marketing officer.

He will join a short list within pharma of companies with a chief marketing officer, despite the job title – and the responsibilities it comes with – being commonplace within the consumer sector.

Benchmarking patient experience and pharma CX

Pharma’s use of communication channels is not meeting expectations, with only telephone helplines managing a better than “fair” ranking in our latest survey.

For this we benchmark the customer experience (CX) provided to patients by some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world through the lens of our powerful CXQ® metric.

The research also finds that digital channels have definitively taken over as the primary source of pharma-created information. Within this, patients’ favourite channels were company websites, social media, or sponsored forums, as they increasingly seek information on their own terms to suit their digital lives.

It’s time pharma ramped up its focus on digital transformation

Pic by Patrick Untersee on Unsplash

The pharmaceutical industry was less ready for digital transformation in 2021 than it was in 2018, partly due to the strain of responding to COVID’s digital demands.

That’s one of the conclusions from our latest piece of research, The State Of Digital Excellence In The Global Pharmaceutical Industry, which presents a comprehensive picture of how pharma fared in the last six years.

Most recently, it is clear that COVID-19 did catalyse digital transformation across the industry, but it also seems to have brought an element of paralysis as more local and regional commercial leaders got involved.